Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

~

The guy was looking for a truck manual.

“I need to fix my truck,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and squinted. “I can’t work those computer things,” he said. He was wearing a white T-shirt with the hair on his belly showing through and a dark spot down toward his groin.

That would be his navel , I thought.

“It’s a pickup truck,” he said.

~

Once in a long while I can feel myself spilling out through my eyes. Climbing down over my cheeks. These are the best times. The worst times are all the rest.

~

You know what I think? I think when Tutti calls me at work it just makes me lonelier. I think there is something in my brain, some tiny relay, a switch, only pretty small, which gets tripped by certain combinations of light, making it seem as though there are things, for instance, a TV, in the room here with me.

It sounds as if Tutti is in a phone booth in a foreign airport when she calls me at work. Then she puts Sammy on, and it’s this same foreign airport thing.

~

There’s no way I can know for sure if my sister-in-law is falling asleep on the couch every day out there in Edmonton. How could I know that? I would never ask her. And I don’t think she would ever send us a letter: Falling asleep daily, Yours truly, Coco . Probably, if I found out, I would find out by accident, like her boyfriend would make some remark, some joke.

Say I really wanted to know, though. For my own peace of mind or something. Say it was something I just had to know. For instance … I don’t know … say I couldn’t fall asleep. This sounds crazy, but just for the sake of argument, even though I realize it is crazy, but say I worried about my sister-in-law getting enough sleep out there in Edmonton. Say I suspected she was not getting enough sleep.

And she sends us letters, assuring us she is okay. Telling us, don’t worry. Don’t be such a pair of worriers, you two crazy people.

But say I’m still suspicious. Say I detect something in her letters, in the tone of her letters. She’s keeping something from us. She doesn’t want us to worry.

So I lie awake at night, worrying.

What I could do is, I could insist she send me a videotape of her sleeping on the couch. Not just for a minute or two. For at least twenty minutes, so I know she’s not faking. Then I could be assured. Even if they don’t own a video camera, they could rent one. I’m sure you could rent a video camera in Edmonton. They must videotape things out there.

~

All I can hear is the wind outside. I don’t care. I feel all right, except that I have to take a piss and I don’t feel like getting back out of bed.

Somewhere in the Bible it says you are supposed to stop talking to the people in your family forever.

When the wind is like this, I find it hard to sleep. It was worse when we were in the apartment. I would lie awake in bed and imagine all my stuff out on the balcony blowing away.

SOME BIRDSwent by the window. Seagulls.

“It’s going to rain,” Tutti said.

I went over to the window.

~

There is this really weird paper you have to get for the machine at work that photocopies the microfilm. This paper is shiny on one side, and sort of yellowy on the other. You have to put the paper in the paper tray with the yellowy side up. If you don’t do it this way, the paper gets jammed in the microfilm machine. Much of my day is spent traveling to and from the microfilm room, unjamming the microfilm machine because someone put the paper in wrong.

~

Someplace along the way I stopped wanting to lie to people anymore. I wanted to tell the truth. But you try telling the truth. Just try it sometime. Maybe you think you are already doing it.

But I’ll tell you something. I learned a lot along the way, looking at all the other liars.

What? That thing about the house? Forget it. Lies. Not particularly true, anyway. Although I do remember the light of it. But I don’t think I stepped out. I think I was pushed.

I learned you are doomed. But I couldn’t quite get the lesson deep enough. I couldn’t get the consequences to give themselves up to me.

So. Here I am. Here is the state of affairs. This is it.

~

I heard my grandma was dead. Before she died, she had a heart attack and went to live in the St. John’s Rehabilitation Centre for a while. She lived a few more years. She even went home to her apartment some of the time. When she died, she left me her car. My sister got the silver.

~

The first book I ever bought was about the red-tailed hawk. I still have the book. I just remembered it when a little girl came up to me at the reference desk and asked for a book about the red-tailed hawk. At first I thought she said, “I need a book about the red-tailed cock.” But then I realized it was the red-tailed hawk. The girl was about six years old.

We didn’t have any books about the red-tailed hawk. There were citations in some of the encyclopedias, but she needed something she could take home. She said she wanted to cut out some pictures. I told her she shouldn’t cut the pictures out of library books. I told her, “Don’t cut the pictures out of library books. Okay, honey?” I called her honey.

~

Tutti and Sammy are in the living room watching Bambi . They want me to turn off the radio so they can hear the movie better. I’m in the kitchen frying bacon. Tutti calls from the living room, “Can you shut that thing off? We can’t hear Bambi.”

I can hear Bambi. I can hear Bambi from out here in the kitchen. I can hear Thumper, too. I can hear all the little fuckers of the forest.

~

If I had more of those tiny decorative magnets , Hammersmith concluded, I could put up more pictures of my wife . He was writing down things he wanted to have for dinner: liverwurst, steak tartare, Filipino bean sprouts.

~

I probably shouldn’t be in charge of putting Sammy to bed. I always put him to bed too late and in the morning he’s tired. He calls me at work to tell me Mommy won’t let him do something. I can hear Tutti in the background telling Sammy to give her the phone. She gets on the phone and tells me I have to get him to bed earlier at night or else I won’t be allowed to put him to bed anymore.

~

I know you don’t respect me for this. But I don’t care.

I live with it.

You try living with it.

SAMMY GETShis blue stool and carries it over to the toilet. We have one of those plastic things to put on top of the toilet to keep Sammy from falling in. I help Sammy get his pants down.

When he’s got himself sitting down on the toilet, I ask him if he’s okay there all by himself. I tell him I’m going back to have my dinner. If he needs me, I tell him, he should call.

He’s in there singing Christmas carols. We have a Christmas tape going in the living room. Sammy is sitting on the toilet, singing along to the Christmas tape playing on the tape machine in the living room. I wanted to tell you about this, because I wanted you to know something. Sammy is alone in there. He is in there alone in that bathroom, sitting there on that toilet, and he is singing.

~

Dad goes, “Where are the clips? The wind is blowing the tablecloth off the table.”

Dad’s second wife, Gretchen, says, “You were supposed to bring out the clips.”

“No,” Dad says. “I was supposed to bring out the wine and the salad. The person who brings out the tablecloth is supposed to bring out the clips.”

“Dad,” I call. “I just dropped your burger into the barbecue. You got another one in there?”

“No,” Dad says. “That was the last one.”